Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The Universal Subtitle Format (USF) was an ambitious project. It was a XML-based subtitle format, supposed to replace the old and problematic community standard, Advanced Substation Alpha (ASS). It was chosen as the default subtitle format for the Matroska multimedia container, and was the primary format of Medusa's unfortunate successor, ChronoSub.

It failed to achieve that goal.This is what its page on CoreForge has to say:

The format is based on XML for many reasons: flexibility, human readability, portability, Unicode support, hierarchical system and easier management.

While I can certainly understand "flexibility" and "portability", I don't see why you need XML to have a portable format, or Unicode support. But they go ahead and claim human readability and easier management. Is that supposed to be a joke? It sure is human readable - compared to binary formats. But it's still an incredibly verbose format that no sane person would try to edit by hand. And how is it easier to manage? Only if they mean that it's easier to avoid horribly misshapen subtitle files (you know, the kind of file that's always floating around the community and that VSFilter will happily eat). And what's with "hierarchical system"? It is true, but isn't it also completely irrelevant? Subtitles are NOT intrinsically hierarchical - forcing them to be only complicates matters.

But let's have a look at the format itself. This is a simple "Hello World" in USF:

Note: I removed the "Format:" lines from the above file. This is because, to the best of my knowledge, Sabbu is the only program that actually cares about those lines. Neither VSFilter nor Aegisub care if it's there or not, and both will, in fact, ignore it.

For further comparison, this is what the same script would look like in the current draft of AS5:

The first thing that we can notice there is that ASS is a much more "compact" format, and USF is more "readable" in the sense that you'll easily know what each thing does if you aren't familiar with the format - unless you are very familiar with the ASS format, the "Style" line should be incomprehensible. ASS is also more "horizontal" - that is, unless you cram things into the same line in USF, ASS will take less lines but those lines will be longer.

Here's the important point: USF is NOT designed to be written by hand. It's just too much effort to write all of that, and if you forget to close some tag somewhere, you'll break the entire file, which isn't an issue in an ASS-like format. And this is exactly where the problem is: there is no good editor that supports USF!

Lately, there has been a trend for XML-based subtitle formats. This is probably because XML is relatively easy to parse by a machine, and also because of the "buzz" associated with XML. But let's face it: subtitles are not best modeled by XML. The ASS format is a strange hybrid of an INI file, a CSV list, and TeX, and that works astonishingly well - that's why we have decided to base AS5 on the same combination, although that is a subject for another post.

So here's the situation that USF faced: there was no real editor that could deal with it and nobody wants to write or maintain USF files by hand. Because of that, nobody actually uses USF, so there is no renderer that accepts it. Finally, USF offers very few real benefits over ASS, feature-wise. All in all, it just wasn't interesting to support it, and it faded into oblivion.

But here's an idea: Athenasub (the library that will be the backend of Aegisub 3.x series) will be completely format-agnostic. That would make it feasible to make Aegisub fully support USF, even its fanciest features, except that there is no renderer to display it. Should we bother? Is there still any interest in this format? At the moment, I have little interest in attempting to resurrect it (especially since we have our own plans with AS5), but if there is popular demand for it, I might reconsider. Last time I checked, not even the Matroska team seemed to care much for it anymore.

AS5. USF. And let's not forget Gabest's SSF. Do any of those formats have a future in the community? Or will fansubbers linger to ASS until the rest of their days?

What does AS5 bring to the table that isn't there for ASS? I'd read the spec, but the spec seems to be missing. I've been involved trying to make sure that the OS-X fork of XBMC gets proper ASS support (it has, as well as the linux version), but that's all based on libass - same for the mplayer ASS implementation. Will you be adding AS5 support to libass as well?

I dunno about you guys, but imho, I think that if you were to take the first step by supporting USF, then that would inspire others to complete projects such as making a fully-functional renderer for it. I highly doubt you would make it top-priority, but in between bug-fixing and implementing more and more new features, it could be done. I'd like to see it done myself, so that's 1 vote so far. Whatever. Like I said, it's all your decision to make. Just call me curious. I wanna see the real differences between the formats and if USF could really be the future of subbing, compared with AS5, and SSF. =p

Firstly subtitles are not supposed to be hand edited, otherwise whta would be the idea of your program?Secondly xml format is much simpler to maintain and build upon, than the oceans of text subtitle scripts that exists nowadays.

I find little information about this USF format. That alone makes me hesitant to use it or expect any support for it in the long run. Virtually every site link I found takes me to either a 404 error page or a domain squatter site. What links do work are to sites that give a brief description with links that don't work. From the various subtitle formats I have tested (QuickTime Text, SRT, STL, ASS) I like ASS the best. I get the most control. QT text looks good, but its implentation leaves a lot to be desired. For something QT native, QT text rendering is extremely picky and haphazard. I have gotten the best results with a lot less work with ASS. I downloaded and reviewed the AS5 and have to say I like it alot. It has two things that put it ahead of ASS, more control and simpler formatting.

AS5's gibberish style format makes it nearly uneditable by anything but your "monstersub" thing. You even could make it binary. With ass one should only carefully locate those primary color, vmargin, bold style, border width and shadow width, and figure out whether rgba sequence direct or reverse. It was not ideal, but AS5 is worse. I don't think, abandoning ASS style syntax is a good idea, since one tipically will use all text attributes for root styles to get what one wants instead of leaving it to defaults(?)

As to USF, I agree subs don't require hierarchical structure, and the only benefit from XML format is its self-documenting feature. When writing ass parser, ReadLine made work for me. USF is obviously a bit verbose even for xml: there is no need for "styles", "subtitles", "fontstyle" and "text" tags... what are they for?

And it's not that hard to edit xml. And if you make mistake, it can be easily identified by any xml engine. One can easily break ass too, but I'm not sure if parser will complain about errors and the bug will live in peace.

My overriding priority is to be able to deliver subs in a text format that my clients can import into the likes of Final Cut Pro etc., while moving through Word & SRT as those are the most common to my suppliers'/translators' platforms.

Invariably, this means .doc > .txt > .srt > ass, giving me some very happy subs... but getting from there to .xml is the big hurdle.

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About Aegisub

Aegisub is an advanced subtitle editor for Windows, and UNIX-like systems, such as Linux, Mac OS X and BSD. It is open source software and free for any use.

Aegisub natively works with the Advanced SubStation Alpha format (aptly abbreviated ASS) which allows for many advanced effects in the subtitles, apart from just basic timed text. Aegisub's goal is to support using these advanced functions with ease.